5 steps to ensure life
after application launch

You have made a significant investment in your enterprise applications. Follow these 5 steps to get the return on investment you are due.

By delivering trustworthy data, you can transform the way your business works, achieve better outcomes, and greater user adoption.

Launching a new enterprise application can significantly improve business processes, create efficiencies, and enhance regulatory compliance. The problem is that these systems continue to require attention after they go live in order to deliver their full, intended business value.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to avoid additional project costs and reap the business benefits that enterprise applications are expected to deliver:

Deliver quality data. An application is only as valuable as the quality of its data. In fact, Bloor Research estimates that data quality erodes at 1 percent to 1.5 percent per month.1 In other words, you need to continue data cleansing after the application goes live. What’s worse, error-riddled data is likely to engender mistrust among stakeholders and end users. Design and deploy data quality rules to proactively monitor and cleanse data for all applications. By delivering trustworthy data, you can transform the way your business works, reach better outcomes, and achieve greater user adoption.

Keep the data current. Integrating data from other enterprise applications and data sources can significantly enhance the value of an application to business users. Dedicate time and attention to operational data integration and synchronization. By using a single data integration platform, you can simplify the management of application-to-application data integration. A single data integration platform enables businesses to support any volume, format, latency, or protocol from a centralized hub. Business users can also be assured that they are accessing only the most current data. And you can seamlessly manage, monitor, and control the movement of data through a single platform.

Manage your master data. Master data is your most important data. They include “business entities,” such as customers, partners, part numbers, and so on, that are shared across your enterprise applications. If you have multiple enterprise applications or multiple modules of an application, strongly consider a master data management hub. Manage your data in a central location, create a trusted “golden record” (clean and reconciled master source) of this data, and share it across your enterprise applications. This central management will dramatically increase the organization’s confidence in your most important data. People will no longer come to meetings with different numbers for the same metrics.

Retire legacy applications. For every new application launched, there can be several legacy systems the company no longer needs. Retiring unused applications can save an organization maintenance, licensing, and operating costs. Too often, though, old applications are kept because the data might be needed for compliance reasons. The key to successfully retiring these systems and realizing the cost savings is to first archive the data, which will preserve it once the system is no longer operating.

Drive user adoption. Encourage adoption of these new applications by instilling trust among stakeholders and end users in the quality of your data and the value of new and improved business processes.